Mike FloresThursday, June 09, 2011

Torpor the hateful-est OrbHad a very lovely costand if you ever played it ...can't believe how you just lost!

All of the actual "good cards" Would ignore him, or just mock;Meanwhile the hateful Torpor Laughed off JUST ONE Squadron Hawk!

Then before that Grand Prix eve,Shouta came to say:"Deceiver Twin now can't untap,Stoneforge Mystic looks like crap!"

Now all the brewers love him!And they shouted out with glee:Torpor the hateful-est Orb,Good job in last week's Grand Prix!

da Rosa reigns supreme in Singapore!

here were lots of big Standard events this past weekend... a StarCityGames.com Open, the StarCityGames.com Invitational, and of course the Grand Prix in Singapore. There was also a lot of Legacy played, but given our last couple of weeks' foci, I thought I would just talk (sing, really) about Standard.

And despite the continued success of Caw-Blade variants, I decided this week (in addition to writing that short and silly ditty about Torpor Orb) to focus on all the other interesting stuff that performed. So let's start with Torpor Orb, shall we?

Former Player of the Year Shouta Yasooka leads us off this week with a very different Blue-Black Control deck. It's not quite like the removal / control decks or disruption / control decks that we've seen with their varying Abyssal Persecutors, Sea Gate Oracles, or even Liliana Vess that we have see over the past few months... and his was also not really like any of the Tezzeret decks we've seen since Pro Tour Paris.

Shouta was kind of scraping the mathematical bottom of the barrel in terms of how many artifacts you can reasonably play in a Tezzeret deck. Twelve artifacts is about one card in five (and you get to look at five cards with Tezzeret's "plus" ability).

Many other decks looking for this kind of functionality (that is, turning off Deceiver Exarch) might try to accomplish it via Spellskite. But being a noncreature artifact makes Torpor Orb immune to being cleared by an opposing Jace, the Mind Sculpror, halving a Deceiver Twin deck's usual set of outs against a hateful two.

In case you didn't see the Grand Prix Top 8, it looked like this:

Most of the Caw-Blade decks now look to be playing Dismember. This gives them a potentially one-mana answer to Deceiver Exarch + Splinter Twin, and also a mana-efficient answer to an opponent's equipping an attacker.

Vampires!

Over on the other side of the planet, Vampires proved a serious contender again for the first time in some months.

Matthew Landstrom won the Star City Standard Open in Indianapolis with his trusty Vampires. Meanwhile in the Invitational, two different Vampires decks opened up Day One Standard festivities with perfect 4-0 records:

The short answer is that with Caw-Blade taking up so much of the top tables, and with Caw-Blade so concerned with beating itself—all the card choices revolving around stealing mana from a Sword activation, or getting ahead of an opposing Jace, the Mind Sculptor with a Jace Beleren—there is less space for cards like Day of Judgment or even Gideon Jura that have traditionally plagued creature decks.

Does Caw-Blade currently have the upper hand in this metagame? Yes—of course, yes.

Given the format conditions, does a deck like Vampires have an open door to do some damage? Also yes!

Red Deck Wins

On the subject of burning a creature before it can be equipped with something nasty (say, a Sword of War and Peace), Patrick Sullivan made Top 8 of the Invitational; unsurprisingly, this was his Standard deck:

This time Patrick slimmed his Red Deck down to 20 lands, and included fast one-drops like Furnace Scamp. The absolute top of Patrick's curve was Staggershock at three.

Patrick echoed his former success with a continued devotion to Ember Hauler and Searing Blaze, and overall chose his cards for fast damage and many ways to prevent ever being hit by an equipped white creature.

As with many other decks in this format, PSulli's Red Deck dipped into Phyrexian mana to solve problems; in this case Dismember as a solution to Kor Firewalker (or, say, a one-mana solution to the Deceiver Exarch problem). But unlike so many other decks, PSulli chose to battle Batterskull with Shatter rather than Manic Vandal (I guess he caught wind of the Torpor Orbs half a world away).

For anyone frustrated at the state of the current Standard... I suggest checking Patrick's decks out. For the decade or so I have known him, the Rainmaker has consistently done well with the seemingly underpowered red cards regardless of whatever Brainstorms or Necropotences the rest of the room has brought, and the adoption of an overlooked card like Furnace Scamp, a card "he has big plans for," is just one more notch burnt into his belt.

Now I know I said I was going to skip over Caw-Blade for a week, but who isn't going to make an exception for US National Champion Michael Jacob?

Against some decks he can play for second-turn Stoneforge Mystic / third-turn Batterskull or Sword, and against others the Deceiver Exarch + Splinter Twin win. Or better yet, especially when his opponent isn't certain of what's going on, Jacob can hassle with the more aggressive white splash, get the opponent to tap a bunch of mana in order to avoid being beaten by Batterskull, and then snap back the other direction for his Exarch kill.

Hybrid decks have basically been my favorite for as long as I can remember, and even the straight Exarch decks have been leaning back on Consecrated Sphinx or Inferno Titan anyway as an alternate kill... Why not the actual next-best thing you can do in Standard as Plan B? My guess is that—at least until we see a shakeup, potentially later this month—"Twin Blade" may be a hot strategy online and/or for PTQ play.

This weekend is one of those big events all this stuff we talk about in these columns is meant to lead up to: Pro Tour Nagoya. Check out live coverage here on DailyMTG.com all weekend, and back here as we switch to yet another format to see what the Pros are up to in Block Constructed! Have a great one, and good luck gaming yourselves, if you are hitting the tables.